Anthony Payne

Anthony Payne was an English composer, music journalist, and scholar known for his completion of Elgar’s unfinished third symphony. His style as a composer combines the aesthetics of modernism with English Romanticism, and he was inspired by art, nature, numerology, and several other sources. He was born in London in 1936 to a non-musical family. He first became interested in music in 1946 when he heard a radio broadcast of Brahms’ Symphony No. 1, and the following year he began composing and enrolled at Dulwich College in London. He served in the Royal Corps of Signals for two years before continuing his education at the University of Durham from 1958 to 1961. After his graduation, he worked as an author, musicologist, and freelance music critic. He returned to composing in 1965 with the Phoenix Mass, which he considered to be his first major work. He married soprano Jane Manning in 1966, and in 1968. his book Schoenberg was published in the Oxford Studies of Composers series. He wrote several other scholarly articles on Frank Bridge in the '70s, and he composed the Concerto for orchestra, The World’s Winter, and First Sight of Her and After which earned him a Radcliffe Award. His 1981 chamber piece A Day in the Life of a Mayfly attracted attention with its seamless combination of English Romanticism and Modernist characteristics. He taught composition at Mils College in 1983 as a visiting professor, and he was a composition professor at the London College of Music from 1985 through 1986. With his wife, he co-founded the ensemble Jane’s Minstrels in 1988, and he composed and arranged repertoire for the group including Aspects of Love and Contentment. Payne began working on Elgar’s third symphony in 1993 under the title Edward Elgar: the sketches for Symphony No 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne. The Elgar family gave their approval of the project in 1995, and Payne completed it two years later. The reconstruction was premiered in 1998 by Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Payne also released the book Elgar’s Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction. After his intense immersion into the compositional style of Elgar, Payne temporarily lost touch with his own style as a composer. However, by 2002, he had rediscovered his sense of individuality with Visions and Journeys, which was commissioned by the BBC for the 2002 Proms festival. His music returned to the Proms in 2006 with the completion of Elgar’s unfinished Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6, which was also featured on Tadaaki Otaka’s 2008 release Elgar / Payne: Symphony No. 3; Pomp and Circumstance March No. 6. Payne was honored in 2011 with a British Composer Award for his String Quartet No. 2, and in 2013 his music appeared on Anthony Payne: Phoenix Mass & Other Works. Inspired by the landscapes of artist Arthur Streeton, Payne composed Of Land, Sea and Sky for the 2016 Proms, and it proved to be his last major composition. He passed away in 2021, one month after his wife’s death. The BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Payne’s Spring’s Shining Wake at the 2021 Proms as a memorial tribute, and his music can also be found on the 2024 album Anthony Payne: Visions and Journeys with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
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